


like wildfire, like the fatal blow

by ninemoons42



Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: Alternate Universe - Military, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - No Powers, Biting, Hand Jobs, Inspired By Tumblr, M/M, Plot What Plot/Porn Without Plot, Porn with Feelings, Soldiers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-03
Updated: 2018-02-03
Packaged: 2019-03-10 22:33:43
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,239
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13511139
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ninemoons42/pseuds/ninemoons42
Summary: He hopes only to recover from the physical injuries, because war is an injury to the soul and it's nearly impossible to heal that kind of injury.All he's got, are these stolen meetings, these stolen hours.





	like wildfire, like the fatal blow

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Cor Leonis Week 2018 (specifically for Ships Day!) at the urging of friends and enablers: but I really owe the existence of this to dear [notavodkashot](http://notavodkashot.tumblr.com/), who patiently encouraged me and also yelled loud and loving encouragement even as I struggled to keep writing. ♥♥♥ always.
> 
> [This is not actually related to [this](http://archiveofourown.org/works/12911415). Think of that story and of this one as swerving AUs.]

Cold, cold, cold, walling him in, barring him in ice and the sick thin gasps of nightmare, and he curls helplessly in on himself: nerve endings fraying, shaking, as he tries to wake, tries to sleep, torn between opposing forces, and he can hear something, some kind of stuttering rhythm, closer and closer and there’s a whine in the air and he’s, he’s not making that sound, is he? Not him, he can’t even breathe, can’t even force his eyes open and -- 

“Cor.”

Warmth soaking into the cold sweat of his skin and he screams, thin slice of sound caught in the trap of his teeth, not quite waking even as he’s flinging himself up from the tangle of sheet and pillow and -- eyes, eyes watching him, lines of long hair hanging past a shoulder, curling at a temple.

Understanding, hollow, immeasurably kind, in a way that still knocks him down because it’s so so new, and -- maybe he has seen that kindness too many times and maybe he has seen that kindness once in ten thousand lifetimes. Kindness like shared scars and the warmth of the hand that is gently closed on his shoulder, shivering with cold, because now that Cor’s almost awake he can see the mists of their breaths, shared, rising between them.

He can’t quite make himself speak yet. He’s trying to remember this face. Trying to fix it in his mind for the next nightmare, the next gaping canyon of night-fears. 

“Bad as it ever was,” is what he hears Nyx say. “Same as always?”

Rustle, thump, undressing: thin worn shirt and rundown seams, and the acrid smell of days-old sweat, of dried mud and dried blood and the little grains of shot and gunpowder and those terrible clotting things from some dried-out old first-aid kit. All past their prime and adding that decaying must to the already overpowering smell: it should have been offensive, straight up.

Here in this night Cor has no intention of pulling away, of flinching away, and he just slings an arm around Nyx’s shoulders.

“Same,” he says, finally, as Nyx rolls his head from side to side to free his braids from where they’re trapped, between skin and scars. 

“Yeah, well, just, roll over, right?”

Down. Cor lets himself be pulled back down to the bed. It’s not even a proper bed when he can feel the slats of the frame, the ragged running holes in many-times-mended blankets. But the bed is miraculously large enough for two to share, for two to thrash and kick, for two to shiver wrapped and flung together.

Which is why he doesn’t complain when he’s the little spoon, again, and he has to draw his knees up sharply, or else he’ll end up halfway off the length of the bed: and he can’t complain, either, has no voice to, has no sense to. Not when Nyx is plastered vital and smelly and real against his back, shirt scratching against Cor’s skin, flimsy tattered hems on shirt and shorts against the fact that Cor is leaking all his heat out past the ruined blankets, since he’s not wearing a shirt and his trousers are more rundown than the bed. 

Nyx behind him, no longer careful in the way he holds him: which is just what Cor wants. So Nyx’s arm is pressed almost painful, almost threatening, against his throat, against his windpipe; so Nyx’s fist is audibly closing and creaking -- white-knuckled crack of protest -- in his belt loop.

“Fuck,” he hears Nyx say.

Inadequate small word.

All the words in the world would never be enough to even hint at the nightmares, the teeth and the claws, the blood and the blank eyes. Shell-casings everywhere and the broken hardware of tattered guns.

Words? He’ll leave those to others.

To Nyx, who is whispering to him: “Prom’s -- coming here too. Heard he was within hours of catching me on the road, actually. Left a message with -- never mind, you know what, I was going to ask you why Luche wasn’t here. Seems those orders never even arrived, why am I not surprised. I gave him a job, you know. Shadowing you. For my fucking peace of mind. Poor asshole, he’ll get here and you may well be long gone by then.”

“No. Prompto,” he mutters, caught in Nyx, caught on the name.

“Yeah. Like I said. He could be here in an hour. He could be here in a day. I’m to hold, at least, until he gets here. I’m assuming he’s got the next items. So I have that, and -- you?”

He’s not thankful to be reminded of the long angry welt that -- that actually, he’s lying on. He can feel the stitches, the ghosts of the stitches, still stuck in his skin, sheets catching on them. “Not until the doctor clears me.”

“Poor you.” Not mocking at all. “Forced to rest. Good. I would tell them to keep you here until this whole fucking outbreak calmed itself down.”

He snorts.

“I know, right? Because if it isn’t one thing it’s another, and if it isn’t that, then it’s ten thousand wildfires erupting on one single godsdamned battlefield. Fuck this.” Nyx’s arms, tightening, so Cor can’t break free. He has no intentions of breaking free. Here he is not imprisoned. Here there are no bars. Here there are no restraints. He’d melt back further into Nyx if he could. 

He does remember to speak, then. “Stay,” he says, both hands gripping Nyx’s arm. 

“Until I have to go. Hells. Right here until, until I can’t be. Until I have to be gone.”

Heaving breaths on the back of his neck. Harsh gusts, Nyx muttering, and the words are beyond him. He’s not listening. He’s just -- remembering to be here, and Nyx does calm, somewhat, after a fashion, after a few moments. 

“Cor.”

“Yeah,” he says, and he turns his head, and feels the scrape of Nyx’s cheek: over him, against him, pressing the sensations in.

“What do we do, after all this?”

He remembers coming up with a new answer, somewhere in the bloodsoaked agony of even getting here in the first place, bullet-whine too loud in his ears: “Find a beach where we can forget our names. Build a boat.”

“Go out fishing in that boat.”

“No. Go out in that boat. Bake ourselves in the sun.”

“Lazy. But that sounds like the best thing. Why the fuck do you keep getting sent to hospitals that are so cold? My feet are ice already.”

He has no answer to that.

He doesn’t need the words anyway; he just needs the convulsive press of Nyx, like he’s trying to burrow into him, and Cor would -- maybe tear his own back open along the many scars, the many wounds, to let him in, further and further, to let him sleep in the hollow beneath his heart.

Or, or, if he could, he’d turn around and climb straight into Nyx: wrap himself around that bent back, those tense shoulders, live literally in the bones of him. 

How he comes to think of things like this, he doesn’t know, but that’s the thought that comes back to him, again and again the one straw he grasps at when he’s thrashing through his dreams and his fevers and his wounds.

He must sleep at some point because when he opens his eyes his arm’s gone wildfire, numbed pins and needles, and Nyx is muttering desperately behind him, rising whisper-whine of denial, “please” and “don’t” and Cor pulls Nyx’s spasming fist up and -- bites, teeth meeting and not gently beneath his thumb.

Just a hair’s-breadth away from breaking the skin, from drawing blood: and Nyx bolts up and over him, shaking, wide awake. 

The look on his face is as familiar to Cor as his own weary nightmares.

“We’re going to die like this, in our beds, not because we bled out but because, because our minds just -- broke.”

“Don’t let Prompto hear you say that,” Cor says.

“Yeah, no, you’re too late. I heard him say it. Swearing for five minutes, I counted, and then he said it. Didn’t know whether I wanted to hit myself or hit something else. Or get you there somehow. You’d have let him hit you.”

“I would have told him to hit me. Not possible. So -- save it,” Cor says. “Save it for the next mission.”

“Choke it down, yeah.”

He thinks he can reach out to Nyx, now, and -- there is the newest scar on him, slash down his right jaw, dark even in the twilight of the room. Shrapnel, he’d been told. He hadn’t wanted to know the rest of the details.

(Prompto, he knows, would have asked for the bloody whole nine yards.)

“You’re freezing, what the actual fuck,” he hears Nyx say -- but Nyx doesn’t flinch or pull back. He does exactly the opposite, leaning into his hand. Cor can feel the pocks and the pits in his skin, star-shaped scars old and new, fixed point in his life, and he’s grateful, when he finally wearily levers himself up from the sheets to catch him in a kiss.

And this, this ought to be new: he can count these moments on his two hands, maybe not even that much, but Nyx makes a harsh sound that breaks deep in his throat, that he passes on with his next shuddering breath, and Cor swallows that sound and kisses him again.

He loses himself in Nyx’s breath and Nyx’s warmth, and pulls away only when the angle twists him far enough around that his wound protests: cry of pain in his nerves, and he groans, and drops back onto the bed.

“Should I apologize?” Nyx, wild-eyed over him, mouth curved like remorse, like he’s hearing a joke that sounds like barbed wire.

“No.”

He turns on to his other side, hears Nyx draw in a ragged breath -- he must have seen the healing wound, still inflamed -- and he mutters, “Don’t look at it. Get behind me.”

“Pushy,” when Nyx says it, sounds like “Thanks.”

And somewhere in the movement he can feel nothing but bare skin against his back and he’s clumsy when he returns the favor, fumbling his trousers off, and -- yes, that’s the want that won’t leave him, that won’t let him go, around Nyx.

Want, and, and what else?

Not Nyx’s arm on his throat, this time: his hand. Rough and gentle, carefully carefully cupping around the vulnerable places of him, a hand that’s not going to strike him down. A hand that holds him, anchors him, and Cor takes a deep breath and pushes away the taste of blood on his tongue.

Mouth, opening against his skin: Nyx is doing the thing again, scraping teeth along the back of his neck, and Cor shudders out a sigh. Bows into that touch, shakes and shakes and his free hand lashes out to catch Nyx’s, laying along the pillows. He has to find something to hold on to, and he curls their hands together into one single fist, hearts beating doubled and fast in the joints, in the fingertips.

That makes things easy to remember: they do this, in the moments snatched from the grind of the fight, and it’s like his body needs the kind of reminders that linger, that mark him up, that he can gnaw on and hold helplessly on to, in the seconds and minutes of the immediate aftermath -- and then in the long crushing hours and days before they can find each other again.

Doesn’t help the fierce wild thrill that burns him alive when Nyx moves the hand that was around his throat, and touches him: here, on this string of breathless thunderbolt moments when he can’t even choke out Nyx’s name, when he can’t even think of what he can do, how he can reciprocate. Caught here between Nyx’s mouth on the back of his neck, and Nyx’s hand around his cock, he can’t focus even though he wants to, he wants it so badly, so he can sear it deeper and hotter, past all his thoughts, past all his reason. So he can hang on to it, burning in his very nerves, in his very blood.

Nyx’s hand moving on him, deliberate, drawing him on and on, like he’s falling apart piece by piece, all the words caught silent and tangled in his throat -- it’s good, it’s so good, and he’s bucking helplessly into the solidness of Nyx, unraveling at the pace Nyx sets and not his own -- 

“If you could see yourself now,” he hears Nyx, low sharp needy snarl. “If you could see, Cor, you’re perfect, you’re perfect, and I can see you and, and fuck, I get to see you like this and you’re good, you’re fucking good -- ”

He hisses. Thoughts tangling together as soon as they break through the haze, words falling away, so close so close -- 

And Nyx keeps up the pace, punishing, methodical, until he hears words and doesn’t recognize his own voice: “Can’t, can’t -- ”

“Yes you can, yes you can, you’re gonna love it, come on hold on hold on _wait for it_ \-- ”

Nyx, laughing softly, voice gone dark and twisted and Cor feels it like a knife in his ribs, like the last soundless scream he’s been holding inside, and finally -- Nyx twists his wrist just so, and the world shatters.

**Author's Note:**

> Come talk to me on Tumblr at my FFXV sideblog [@ninemoons42-lestallumhaven](http://ninemoons42-lestallumhaven.tumblr.com/) or at my main [@ninemoons42](http://ninemoons42.tumblr.com/)!


End file.
